Editor's Note: On March 25, 1998, the feast of the Annunciation,
Professor Jaroslav Pelikan was chrismated by Metropolitan Theodosius at the
Chapel of St. Vladimir's Seminary and received into the Orthodox Church.
Professor Pelikan is recognized as a specialist in the study of church history
and doctrine. Among his more than 30 books on religion and culture, he is
particularly well known for what might be considered his life's work, the five
part series entitled: The Christian Tradition - A History of the
Development of Doctrine. He is Sterling professor emeritus of
history at Yale University, where he has taught since 1962. In 1983 he
received the Jefferson Award, the highest honor which the US Government bestows
upon a scholar in the humanities. He also received an hononary Doctor of
Divinity in 1988 from St. Vladimir's Seminary.

Perhaps the best single introduction to his wide academic interests in his
book, The Melody of Theology - A Philosophical Dictionary. This was
described by him as "a kind of autobiography in small bites - for it has
the beguiling simplicity of being organized by the alphabet"
(Preface). He affirms that though this book bears no dedication, if it had
it would have been inscribed to "George V. Florovsky (1893-1979), who, more
than any other person except by late father, taught me to sing 'the melody of
theology' this way." In delivering the Fr. Florovsky Memorial Lecture
at Princeton Seminary in 1997, Professor Pelikan stated that Fr. George was his
"dear friend and mentor...the last of [his] mentors, and the one to whom he
is indebted the most."

He was also close friends with Frs. Alexander Schmemann and John Meyendorff.
While introducing Professor Pelikan as the commencement speaker at St.
Vladimir's Seminary in 1975, Fr. Alexander noted, "The hardest thing
for me to say about Professor Pelikan is why he is not Orthodox." In
a conversation shortly after his conversion he acknowledged that his path
to Orthodoxy, in fact, resembled that of a pilot who continuously circled a
particular airport, looking for a way to land.

His commencement address reprinted below raises the issue which has always
been essential to Orthodoxy: How can the Church, while being rooted and
nourished by Holy Tradition, respond in an appropriate way to the questions of
each age? Morever, this relation between "continuity and
creativity" has been, as Professor Pelikan states, "the central issue
of my own scholarly work."

In the tradition of Frs. Florovsky, Schmemann, and Meyendorff, we welcome
Professor Pelikan into the Orthodox Church as our teacher.

***********************************************

CONTINUITY AND CREATIVITY

A Commencement Address at St. Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary,
Crestwood, New York, May 24, 1975.

by Dr. Jaroslav Pelikan

When I was invited to deliver this commencement address, I did not have much
difficulty deciding that I should say something about continuity, what the Greek
Fathers call [...]for the relation between this [...] and the development of
doctrine or (to alliterate in English alone rather than in English and Greek)
between continuity and creativity is the central theme of my own scholarly work
, and it is also the persistent issue in Orthodox theology. Having decided on
the topic, I then was obliged, after the fashion of at least some preachers, to
find a text -- or perhaps pretext. Since I was coming to an Orthodox seminary, I
thought first of a favorite passage from St. John of Damascus, in which he says:
ALike a bee, I shall gather all that
conforms to the truth... I am not offering you my own conclusions, but those
which were laboriously arrived at by the most eminent theologians, while I have
merely collected them and summarized them, as far as was possible, into one
treatise." I once copied this passage in Greek as the inscription of a book
of mine that I sent to Father John Meyendorff, to which he responded:
"Better for a theologian to be a bee than a butterfly!"

But with a name like Jaroslav, I then thought that it might be more
appropriate to select my text from some aspect of Slav culture. May 26 is the
birthday of Pushkin, and, after all, Dostoevsky's famous lecture of June 8,
1880, on Pushkin represents the secular (and yet not really very secular!)
counterpart of this very issue of continuity and creativity. Further reflection
on proper names, however, led me to recall that in this haven of Pravoslavie
there are faculty members with such surnames as Schmemann, Meyendorff, and
Erickson, and I realized that I would have to turn to the Teutonic literary
tradition for the epigraph of my address. And, of course, I found it where I
always look first in German literature for a winged word, in Goethe=s
Faust, in the familiar lines:

Was du ererbt von deinen Vatern hast,

Erwirb es, um es zu besitzen.

Although the play on the words Aererben@
and Aerwerben@
cannot be satisfactorily reproduced, the sense can be paraphrased something like
this: AWhat you have received as a
heritage from your fathers, you must earn if you are really to possess it.@
This is set into contrast with the earlier words of the pedantic famulus,
Wagner, who is apparently, as they say nowadays, Ainto
history,@ and expresses his pleasure
at seeing

...wie vor uns ein weiser Mann gedacht

Und wie wirs dann zuletzi so herrlich weit

gebracht.

(AHow even before our times a wise
man had some ideas, and how now at last we have gloriously brought these ideas
so far along.@) These two passages
represent two contrasting views of continuity and creativity, and of these views
I want to speak this afternoon.

I

The words of the famulus Wagner are a brief statement of the creed of
historicism, which was beginning to dominate the thought, and especially the
academic scholarship, of the West when Goethe was writing his Faust. Indeed, he
ridiculed it as one who in many ways shared it. But for our purposes the credo
provides a convenient foil, for it shows how a false conception of continuity
leads to a distorted notion of creativity, how our ability to see the present
clearly depends on our sharpening our perspective on the past.

And that is precisely Wagner=s
problem. He begins his disquisition of Athe
uses of history@ with what is to him,
I am sure, the generous concession that Aeven
before our times a wise man had some ideas.@
The condescension that speaks through these words is at worst in its very effort
to acknowledge that someone in the past could conceivably have said something
sensible. But the determination of what in the past may have something to tell
us is based on what we ourselves have said and done. It is the search for the
ancestry of our own ideas and systems. Now even this search leads to some
surprises. Just when someone has invented a new system or created a new theology
or (if you like) launched a new heresy, historical research will show that, at
least in nuce, the idea has been tried before and has failed. For example, the
ghosts of Gnostics seem to have returned in the past few decades to haunt the
children of our modern age. But more serious is the distortion of the past that
comes when we put to it only our present-day questions, instead of attempting to
discover its questions - questions that the past addresses to us and to our
time. To find it remarkable that a Plato or a Gregory Nazianzenus had a
first-class intellect is to have misread history as no more than a prelude to
this existential moment. As one can travel to other lands and be irritated that
these foreigners do not speak English or, alternately, be amazed that ehse
little children can chatter in a foreign tongue, so one can travel through time
as well as through space without ever letting the relation between subject and
object be reversed. Then the search for continuity becomes an intellectual hobby
or is seen almost as an embarrassment.

With the acceptance of an out-of-focus picture of the past there inevitably
comes an exaggerated interpretation of the present: AAnd
how now at last we have gloriously brought these ideas so far along.@
As Faust says sarcastically in reply, AYes,
indeed, all the way to the very stars - ja, bis an die Sterne weit!@
Ironically, this tendency to make the present an absolute by which the past is
judged has often been the occupational disease of historians, whose task it is
(or ought to be) to try to make the past live. For example, one of the foremost
historians of Christian doctrine in the nineteenth century, Ferdinard Christian
Baur, published in 1838 a book on the history of the doctrine of reconciliation;
the three periods of that history were said to be: the fifteen centuries from
the very beginnings of the Church until the Reformation, the three centuries
from the Reformation to the death of Immanuel Kant (in 1804), and the three
decades from the death of Kant to the publication of the book. So solemn a claim
about one=s own point in history is,
if anything, even more silly than the view of the rest of history on which it
relies. Just think of the fads and fancies in the name of which the Christian
tradition has been asked to surrender its central convictions! During the
Enlightenment and through the nineteenth century, the gospel was attacked as
gloomy and pessimistic, with all its talk about sin and corruption, which had
now been transcended by modern progress. In the twentieth century, on the other
hand, the Christian message seems to be too good to be true, promising as it
does hope and eternal life and the transformation of human nature into divinity.
The objections to Christianity have come a full one-hundred-eighty degrees, and
those who have, in the name of a particular contemporary theology, called the
past to judgment have found themselves superseded and indeed relegated to that
very past which they had treated so haughtily. And meanwhile they have been
deprived of the ability to look at their own Asyllable
of recorded time@ with the detachment
and understanding that comes from a cultivation of the tradition.

When past and present are related to each other as they are in Wagner=s
formula, both continuity and creativity suffer. The Church does not define
itself on the basis of its continuity through history, but on the basis of its
capacity to respond to current events. This preoccupation with the contemporary
- and therefore with the temporary - is identified by some modern theologians as
the very soul of creativity. But when history is seen as a series of existential
moments strung together only by their chronological sequence, the response to
current events is obliged to improvise as though no one had ever had to respond
to events before. Now whatever such improvisation may do to the life to the life
of man and of nations, in the life of the Christian Church it would mean that Acreativity@
and Arelevance@
can be achieved only by the surrender of Christian identity. We are told in the
Gospel (Mark 9:41) that whoever shall give a cup of water to drink in the name
of Christ will be blessed. The social gospel of the twentieth century has
mounted massive programs to give the cup of cold water; but because of its loss
of continuity it has been unable to specify how this is Ain
the name of Christ,@ until there is
little if any discernible difference between the social and political action of
churchmen and that of their secular (usually liberal) colleagues. Eventually
someone is bound to conclude that there is no point in reciting the name of
Christ in the first place, since it does not make the water any colder or more
refreshing, and the net result is secularization - which some Acreative@
theologians are now prepared to hail as the wave of the future. The flower has
been cut off from its roots, and now it is beginning to fade.

II

Dr. Faustus, you may recall, had studied, APhilosophie,
Juristerei und Medizin, und leider auch Theologie,@
and though he had lost his faith in the process (you may remember his words on

Easter morning, "Die Botschaft hor ich wohl, allein mir fehlt der Glaube"),
he had not completely lost his mind. The interpretation of "continuity and
creativity" expressed in his formula, "What you have received as a
heritage from your fathers, you must earn if you are really to possess it,"
is by no means confined to faith and to theology, but pertains to the arts, to
language, and to American constitutional government. Therefore Faust,. the
prototype of the modern pagan, may serve us the way Aratus served St. Paul on
the Areopagus with the words: Afor we
are also his offspring@ (Acts 17:28).

The fundamental presupposition of this formula is that there truly is an
inheritance that we have received from our fathers, that it is "given"
both in the sense of being objectively there whether

we accept it or not and in the sense of being a gift that has come not from
us but to us. Applied to the life and faith of the Church, this means
that no generation ever begins de novo in a real sense, not even the
apostolic generation did, for it affirmed, throughout the New Testament and the
early preaching of the message, its continuity with the people of Israel. When
the Church is asked to "give an answer" (1 Pet. 3:15), that answer
takes its beginning from the faith of the 318 Fathers of the Council of Nicea.
When the Church gathers for worship and prayer, one of the central convictions
to which it gives voice is its gratitude for the inheritance which it shares
with all those, past and present, who adore the Blessed and Undivided Trinity.
There have been times when people turned to the Church for political and social
guidance, but now they can get

that elsewhere; they found the highest expression of music and art in the
Church, but no one needs the Church for that any more; they used the Church as a
place to meet friends and to gather with their families, but now there are more
such places than most people and most families want. What is left for the
Church? Why, what was really the "one thing needful" all along, the
tradition of faith and doctrine, of worship and discipline. In the Church and
only in the Church the twentieth century can find this tradition, but it can
find it in the Church only- if the Church preserves and cultivates what it has
inherited from the Fathers. -

But the Church is not a museum or a mausoleum, and its inherited tradition
must not he permitted to become only the artifact of some glorious past. In an
epigram with which I have

come to be identified, tradition is the living faith of the dead and
traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. We who cherish the inheritance
of the Fathers are constantly tempted to clutch it to

our bosoms, to polish it with lapidary skill, or to embalm it for
preservation against the ravages of time--as though a Christian basilica were
some sort of pyramid with an onion dome on top!

For what we have received as a heritage from our Fathers, we must earn if we
are really to possess it. Each generation of the Church has had to learn this
lesson anew. Continuity is not the same as archaism, and over and over the
Church has reacted to the challenges of heresy and unbelief by stating its
historic faith and restating it, and, as Maximus Confessor says, "giving it
an exegesis and working out its implications" (PG 91:260). It, in response
to Christological heresy or to attacks upon the holy icons, it was appropriate
for the Fathers to recite the Nicene Creed with an extended paraphrase that
spoke to these false teachings, then it remains appropriate for us also to
locate ourselves within the continuity of the faith of our Fathers and, in the
name of that continuity, to speak the Word of God to the world of today. For
what a world intoxicated with each fleeting moment needs to sober it up is the
message of the apostolic faith, but we are not simply pipes and conduits through
which that message passes, but living, responsive, and, yes, creative
participants in its ongoing life and history.

It is into that ongoing life and history that we were baptized, and into its
preservation, transmission, and communication that you, as priests of the
Church, are to be sent. Your priestly ministry will be the daily reenactment of
the story of salvation, the daily repossession of the heritage. It will become a
truly creative reenactment and repossession not by cutting itself off from dogma
and liturgy and discipline, but by having the courage to assert what the faith

means as well as what it has meant. Those of us who have had the
privilege of growing up in immigrant communities know the problems, but also the
gratifications, of being bilingual: sometimes it is language A that best
expresses what we want to say, and at other times it is language B, but one of
our tasks was always to foster communication between those who, unlike
ourselves, were so unfortunate as to be able to speak only one language. The
priesthood

of the Church is, in a sense, called to be bilingual, speaking the language
of the tradition and maintaining continuity with it, but then creatively
bridging the gap of communication with those who speak only "modernese."
This is a risky enterprise. It is much easier to live in the past or, on the
other hand to capitulate to modernity and, as the saying goes, to "let
bygones be bygones."

It is to neither of these that we have been called, but to discipleship and
to faithfulness and to continuity with the faithful disciples of the Church in
all ages. Grounded in that continuity and making that tradition our own, we are
set free to speak and to work as those who, through the Incarnation, have been
privileged to share in the very nature of God the Creator and in His freedom.

The charter of this continuity and of this creativity is the summons and the
promise of Our Lord Himself: AIf ye
continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed, and ye shall know